Two teams of UAT Digital Video Students competed against five teams of students from Grand Canyon University in the Spring 2017 Inter-College 48 Hour Film Challenge. This latest installment of the epic crosstown rivalry that has erupted every Fall and Spring since 2011 was a winner for the UATDV family as one of the 2 teams brought home awards for Best Technical and Best Film. The rules of the competition, like all 48 hour challenges, dictated that the team incorporate a specific prop and a specific line of dialogue into their script. In this case the prop was a mirror and…

Daniel Sontag, a Digital Video Alumnus who attended UAT from 2005-2009, won his first Emmy in the Lone Star Regional Emmy’s for the Promotion/ Program Award category on October 15, 2016. Daniel works as a Manager of Brand Marketing at NBC 5 Dallas/Fort Worth, which is the fifth largest market in the United States, which means their viewership is very saturated and has a loyal audience. NBC 5 DFW’s veteran Chief Meteorologist David Frinfrock has been with the station for 40 years, but has plans to retire in a few years. To welcome new meteorologist Rick Mitchell to the team,…

It’s a Digital Video flashback this week! Take a not so big step in the wayback machine to the summer of 2008 when Professor Paul DeNigris and an all-star crew of DV students and alumni got to work with not one but TWO Hollywood stars: Blue Collar Comedy staple Bill Engvall and Machete himself Danny Trejo! Together they made the Western comedy “Cowboy Dreams,” one of DV’s most memorable movies. (Slightly NSFW, by the way.) The film was penned by frequent UATDV collaborator Steve Briscoe (seen in Ouroboros, Borderlands: Change of Hart, and CrossRealm to name but a few), who also…

Students in Professor DeNigris’ DVA254 Motion Graphics class are tasked with re-creating an existing title sequence from a film or TV show as one of their semester projects. The exercise is meant to stretch the students by asking them to look at work done by professional title designers, and figure out how to meet the high bar they set. It’s a hands-on way of forcing students to expand their thought processes and also to better learn their software (in this case Adobe After Effects). Here’s a selection of this semester’s best title sequence re-creations, including Fringe, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Wayward Pines, Parks and…

Every Summer since 2012, UAT Digital Video faculty and students have made a road trip to San Diego to film w00tstock, “a night of geeks + music” hosted by Mythbuster Adam Savage, geek icon Wil Wheaton, and comedy music duo Paul and Storm. Our coverage of w00tstock every year is the best on the web, and we’ve been on hand to capture amazing moments like George R.R. Martin smashing a guitar, LeVar Burton leading the audience in the “Reading Rainbow” song, Adam Savage singing “I Will Survive” as Gollum, and veteran voice actor Rob Paulsen singing “Yakko’s World” from memory –…

UATDV students have finished their horror comedy “Secure. Contain. Protect” and it’s now on YouTube. There were some very cool “firsts” in the making of this one. We were the first crew to film at the historic Hayden Flour Mill in Tempe (thanks to Kris Baxter-Ging and Chris Hansen in the city government). This was also the first UATDV film to use a drone as part of principle photography (for the “monster vision” sequences in the Mill). Synopsis: “A secret government organization called “The Foundation” protects society from supernatural creatures. When one of the creatures classified as “SCP-106″ escapes containment, hapless friends…

UAT Digital Video is thrilled to announce that actor Tony Amendola has been cast in the next project to be directed by Professor Paul DeNigris, called “Toppled.” Mr. Amendola is perhaps best known for his role in the sci-fi series Stargate SG-1 as the noble Jaffa warrior Master Bra’tac. More recently he has appeared on sci-fi series Continuum and fantasy series Once Upon a Time and was one of the key voices in the video game Fallout 4. “Toppled” was written by Ayman Samman who previously collaborated with UATDV on “Parallax” and on “Red Sand: A Mass Effect Fan Film” and…

Loyal followers of UAT’s Digital Video Program surely remember that almost 2 years ago we released “Bohemian Rhapsody: Star Wars Edition.” Rock opera met space opera and then went viral to the tune of 2 million views and counting. Well get ready for our epic parody to begin making the rounds again, starting this weekend. From Time Magazine: “Oct. 31, 2015, is the 40th anniversary of the 1975 release of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a track that remains one of the band’s most popular hits and is considered by many to be among the greatest songs of all time.” Time goes on…

Hollywood filmmakers such as Peter Jackson and James Cameron have spent many years and many millions of dollars developing systems that would allow them to preview in real time the visual effects for their blockbuster films. UAT undergrads replicated their results using off-the-shelf components, the Unreal game engine, some ingenuity, and a ton of hard work. The project was called “CrossRealm” and involved students from the Digital Video, Game Art, Game Design, and Game Programming majors all working together to accomplish something new. This is what the spirit of innovation is all about at UAT! After a bit of post-production,…

At UAT, all students are required to complete a Student Innovation Project (SIP) in order to graduate, and DV students are no exception. Sometimes a SIP is a new product, a new technology, or in the case of many DV SIPs a new way of applying technology to tell a compelling and unique story. “The Composer” by Gwyneth Christoffel and Darien Marion combines live-action, stop-motion, and 2D animation to tell the story of a creatively blocked composer who needs a little nudge to move on with his life and start creating again. Since the film is just about to begin…

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